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webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of October, 2016.

'Black Mirror' Is Back, Reflecting Our Technological FearsOctober 22, 2016(comments)
Hackernews is extremely pleased with and/or bored by a television show depicting the shitty world they are all frantically working to implement. A few Hackernews jaunt off to explore the idea that the Borg, an amoral cybernetic race incapable of independent thought or the slightest trace of empathy, may be the manifestation of evolutionary perfection. There is no apparent irony (or even self-awareness of any sort) on display.

When Your Screen Breaks in the HimalayasOctober 23, 2016(comments)
Apparently the rest of the sentence is "ssh into it from your phone over usb." The author is very pleased with his ability to type commands. At one point he bemoans having to write things down because his phone was not capable of letting him read Wikipedia articles into a voicemail. Hackernews applauds and suggests more systemd commands to run the next time the author is stupid enough to take his laptop to the Himalayas.

We Got PhishedOctober 25, 2016(comments)
An idiot types a password into someone's website. An internet takes over the gmail account and attempts to harvest more passwords from the idiot's coworkers. Google's automated systems turned out to be more competent than anyone working at the idiot's organization. Hackernews remembers to talk about two-factor authentication but can't decide if it would have helped here.

Show HN: Killing Procrastination by Making Everything FitOctober 26, 2016(comments)
A Hackernews starts a business helping people to fill their online calendars with random shit. Hackernews immediately dives into a form of folk-dancing wherein everyone links to a random idiotic program that claims to help losers do things. The pack-dominant Hackernews hold forth with lengthy philosophical treatises describing the correct methods of writing down things you intend to do instead of just fucking doing them.

Why does software development take so long?October 27, 2016(comments)
An internet releases a new version of his video editing software, which is written in C++. He posts a blog full of excuses regarding the lengthy delay between releases of his video editing software, which is written in C++. Hackernews responds by saying that programming is engineering, but it's nothing like other kinds of engineering; it is its own very special kind of engineering. Writing a piece of software is compared to building a skyscraper, constructing the Panama canal, designing a real bridge that alive people use, designing a house, a vacuum cleaner, the actual biological process of evolution, and painting a picture. Hackernews seems to think that civil engineers still design infrastructure with drafting tables and pencils. In accordance with federal law, someone talks about rust. He pretends he means iron oxide, but we can tell he means the programming language because the quote is "it doesn't matter if there is some rust," which is the best possible description of the entire Rust project.

Open Salaries: OutcomesOctober 28, 2016(comments)
Some tiny-ass webdev shop told each other how much money they make. Hackernews either doesn't see the point or totally predicted whatever happened. Some government workers show up and explain that the government has been doing this by law for a really long time, except one government worker who thinks that open salary data means nobody can get promoted. Nobody explains to him the causal relationship between his pay grade and the number on the website.

How to De-Risk a StartupOctober 29, 2016(comments)
A Seventeen Sigma God-Emperor Warrior color codes the random values he has assigned to meaningless statements. Hackernews, gleaning that they are being told to run a business like a business, is outraged. They explain that startups should be based on genius and cunning, and hold up large government procurement programs as examples.

I don't understand Python's AsyncioOctober 31, 2016(comments)
A Hackernews strays from javascript, realizes he doesn't understand something, and proceeds to describe it so others can understand it. No attempt is made to justify this behavior. Hackernews goes absolutely apeshit, spouting every opinion they've ever read about programming languages, programming paradigms, programming language authors, regular authors, and language itself. Unsurprisingly, there is not a single scrap of text worth reading in the entire orgy. In accordance with federal law, FBI response teams were on hand to ensure that at least every third word was 'Rust.'